http://rense.com/general32/americ.htm
Current Communist Goals EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES Thursday, January 10, 1963 .
16. yews technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. yews them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and yews mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
Opposed to traditional (historical) American religion, meaning Christianity, are numerous organizations including Communism (very much alive and well throughout the world, and in the US), radical Islam including the Muslim Brotherhood and their various front groups including CARE and ISNA, the entire pro-death (abortion, eugenics, cloning, stem cell research, health care rationing, euthanasia) array, bogus legal rights groups like the ACLU, militant atheists like the FFRF, and numerous others (EDIT 21 Oct): How could I forget the enviro huggers, anti-speciests (forget American exceptionalism, they oppose human exceptionalism), PETA, climate change alarmists, and population control advocates?
All of these groups are radically opposed to Christianity and will not be content until its public expression is suppressed to the point of equivalence to the racist hangings Chew mentioned. In other countries this is already happening; Canada and some Euro countries are starting to punish people simply for being Christians because their religion is "intolerant". Obviously many primarily Communist/socialist and Islamic countries already suppress or outright persecute Christians.
Based on my debates with certain people, I am becoming convinced that the choice before us as individuals and as a society is becoming more binary. You can believe in truth, goodness, beauty, virtue, etc, or you can believe in nothing. There is purpose to everything, or there is purpose to nothing. Life has meaning, people have meaning, actions have meaning, or nothing at has meaning; the very word "meaning" is meaningless.
If there is truth we can discuss the nature of it. The truth is frequently inconvenient to our personal agendas, which is why there is a strong conflict of interest against it in our society today. As Nietzsche said, [if] “there is no truth, everything is permissible”. Nearly everyone has some rule they wish wasn't there. The difficulty is in recognizing that there are certain inconveniences that can be worth living with for the greater good of preserving the truth as a whole. Sometimes the only way to avoid the slippery slope is to hold what may seem to be, at least emotionally, an unnecessarily hard line. If the right to life is not absolute, then your right to life is not absolute. Quoting another German (Martin Niemöller) "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me."
In 1968, Pope Paul VI (6) issued the encyclical letter Humanae Vitae (Human Life). In it, he reaffirmed the Church's teaching against birth control, despite hopes from some quarters that he would change this doctrine (hint: he can't). He predicted that the widespread availability of birth control, which was initially available to only married couples, would result in widespread social ills, such as divorce, out of wedlock births, loss of respect and objectification of women, and government abusing this new technology as a means of social engineering. The world laughed and said he was an old fogy, completely out of touch. 45 years later, his predictions have come true in a tidal wave of teenage pregnancies, rampant STIs, 50% divorce rate, hook-up break-up culture – and somehow we have accepted this as normal and to some degree inevitable. It doesn't have to be this way. It wasn't this way before.
We consider ourselves the “land of the free”. As Uncle Ben reminds us, “with great power comes great responsibility”. There is a difference between freedom and license. Freedom is the right to do as one ought, the “right to do right”. License is, strictly defined, permission to do something, which may or may not be morally permissible. Nowadays when most people say freedom, they really mean license. They think ability, or the ability not to get caught, means permission. The test of character is what you do when no one is looking, or when you think you can get away with it. You do not have a right to do what is wrong, even if you have the ability. The “don't impose your morality on me” argument is bogus, since it attacks the very idea of law. Law is, precisely, imposed morality. The only question is what morality shall we impose. Taking the least common denominator of all known moral systems is not necessarily the best kind of law.
There are three options for a society. 1) People do the right thing on their own (self control); 2) people are forced to do the right thing by laws and law enforcement (state control), 3) neither, in which case you have anarchy (no control). The United States was founded under the assumption that the citizens would by and large practice #1, supplemented to a small extent by #2 (the “locks keep honest people honest” principle). We have seen the results of police states around the world; there is no freedom there. The only safeguard for freedom is to exercise our own freedom responsibly. When you get free candy out of the machine by shaking it, return a product that you broke yourself but claim it was defective, download a movie without paying for it, etc, you are reducing your own personal freedom and society's collective freedom. There's no such thing as a victimless crime. Every crime affects someone, even you. It is perhaps counterintuitive that by exercising freedom irresponsibly, you are reducing freedom in the world, by increasing the need for more state control. The state will always move to fill the control gap, and rightfully so, because the alternative is a slide into anarchy. The TSA is only a shadow of things to come if the vast majority of citizens do not exercise freedom responsibly.
It is because of these principles, or more accurately the erosion thereof, that I fear for the future of this country and this world. Religion (mainly Christianity, for this country) does not restrict freedom; it encourages it. It proposes a moral standard which can to a certain degree remove the need to have more laws and more law enforcement. It provides motivation beyond the reach of law, into the area of character, when no human may be looking on. As Chesterton would say, our problem is not that we have followed our faith too well, but that we have not followed it well enough.
I strayed rather far from the original topic, but I am finding it's hard to argue specific topics when people are no longer believing in the general principles that underlie them. As I said before, if there is truth, we can discuss the nature of it. If there is no truth, then there is nothing to discuss, and the direction our society takes will be dictated by numerical majority, or whichever side fights harder.